blog posts for nerds

If you use NGINX, you probably care about performance, and one of the easiest website performance wins is to Gzip http requests. Gzip can not only increase the speed of your website, but also save bandwidth. I’ll show you how to Gzip http requests with your NGINX server in this post.

NGINX is a great lightweight webserver, and the one this blog runs on. Having made many iterations including merging other blogs into it, and removing posts and entire sections, I’ve had to create a number of redirects for both user experience and search engine indexing. This post will show you how to create a variety . . . read more

Today I was putting a Gravity Form in the footer of a site with long pages, hiding the form by default, and displaying it when a user clicks the contact link using a little jQuery. Since Gravity Forms shows validation and ( optionally ) confirmation messages on the form itself, this presented a problem when . . . read more

If you’re going to use CSS3 properties in your designs, it’s a good idea to make sure you aren’t trying to apply them where they aren’t supported. Old browsers have a hard enough time trying to grok your newfangled HTML(5). Don’t confuse them with transforms and text shadow.

I always thought of my next door neighbor Ray as my grandfather. Ray was an old WWI vet, retired trucker, and junior golf instructor who had a stack of hardbound journals he had written in for decades. I remember one of the things he shared about his Parkinson’s, was the difficulty writing in his journal. . . . read more